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Joost Oomen - Guest Writer 2025-2026
Het paradijs van slapen, of Iemand die met bloemen fietst
Gerrit Blauw leidde een rijk en mooi leven, en wil dat leven nu ook graag in schoonheid eindigen. Hij is niet ziek, hij heeft geen pijn, maar hij beschouwt zijn leven als voltooid. In zijn zoektocht naar een dokter die hem wil euthanaseren, stuit Gerrit op Theo Engel, die door het voortdurende contact met patiënten die ondraaglijk en uitzichtloos lijden zijn geloof in schoonheid juist is verloren. Lukt het Gerrit om Theo dat geloof terug te geven? En is dat voldoende voor Theo om Gerrit te helpen bij zijn wens om mooi dood te mogen gaan?
Lievegedicht
Tien jaar lang trok Joost Oomen langs de poëziepodia van Europa. Hij droeg voor in kippenhokken, Portugese kastelen, de tv-studio’s van Eva Jinek en Humberto Tan, metrostations en circustenten. Hij stal het hart van het grote publiek door zijn deelname aan De Slimste Mens, waarna zijn shows op De Parade, Lowlands en Oerol in groten getale werden bezocht. Ook zijn boeken en zijn columns op Instagram en in de noordelijke dagbladen kennen een trouwe schare fans. Het enige wat nog ontbrak? Een dichtbundel.
Visjes: een avontuur op Salina
Ten noorden van Sicilië ligt het eiland Salina. Het bestaat uit twee dode vulkaantoppen, vijf dorpjes en een vuurtorentje. Het ligt in een kristalheldere zee, met aan de linkerkant de rokende Stromboli en aan de rechterkant de besneeuwde toppen van de Etna.
Maar het eiland is in mineur. Al maanden blijven de toeristen weg. Midden in deze crisis, in mei 2021, wordt Joost Oomen uitgenodigd voor een kunstenaarsresidentie op Salina. Hij besluit de eilanders te helpen. Om de toeristen terug naar het eiland te lokken, wil hij bewijzen dat de vissen rond Salina gevoel voor poëzie hebben. Hoe? Door ze met een gedicht te vangen.
Het perenlied
In Het Perenlied wordt Gabriel verliefd op de Bietenkoningin, een meisje geboren uit drie bieten. Samen beramen ze een protestactie tegen het pretpark waar ze werken. Wanneer hun actie mislukt, vertrekt de Bietenkoningin naar New York om haar vader te zoeken, die daar zelf op zoek is gegaan naar zijn grote liefde, een collega die omkwam tijdens de aanslagen op het World Trade Center.
Het Perenlied is een boek over de liefde. Het Perenlied is een vrolijk boek.
De eerste kip van Nederland
De maan is vannacht zo groot als een pruim. Ik kan de contouren van bomen in de verte zien, maar de kleuren van de zomerbloemen rond de hoeven van mijn paard blijven grijs. Er ligt iets op de oever en ik weet niet wat het is. Het lijkt op een enorme kluwen van uit elkaar getrokken lisdodde, rietsigaren, losjes samengepakt tot een kleverige bal van nat dons.
De zon als hij valt
Een Libische bootvluchteling en een Spaans meisje, elk met een vreemd object in bezit, lijken voor elkaar bestemd.
De stort: poëzie
In dit lange, lyrische gedicht, in de traditie van Howl van Allen Ginsberg, breekt Oomen een lans voor zijn generatie. Een generatie die volgens hem wel degelijk een unieke stem heeft, een stem die gehoord dient te worden. Door zijn vele optredens wordt Oomen wel gekenschetst als 'het spervuur van de decibellen en emoties'. Op schrift is deze achtbaan nog steeds te herkennen. Rijk aan beelden, taalspel en ritme getuigt zijn poëzie van een groot talent in de lijn van Lucebert, Vinkenoog en Van Doorn.
Joost Oomen’s Library Favourites
Ursula LeGuin - Dancing at the Edge of the World
"I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind," writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind--strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.
Jack Spicer - My Vocabulary Did This to Me
In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.
Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America, Pill vs Springhill Mine Disaster, in Watermelon Sugar
Three counterculture classics by Richard Brautigan, literary icon of the 1960s. Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways. In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate. The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly one hundred poems, first published in 1968.
Arthur Rimbaud - Collected Poems
Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. Out of his brief, colorful life and wilderness of sensory poetry, a mythic Rimbaud has been created. One of the greatest French poets of all times, Rimbaud has become an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom--though behind the myth of the man lies a poetic adventure of high ambition and painful rigor, poignant yet heroic.
Lucebert - vaarwel: achtergelaten gedichten
vaarwel. achtergelaten gedichten bevat gedichten die Lucebert tussen 1949 en 1952 schreef en toont de jonge dichter van zijn meest lyrische, verliefde en verlangende kant. Ook is er de speelse maar bloedernstige taalbarok die naar de hemel reikt én langs de afgrond scheert. Puntgaaf als de gedichten zijn passen ze prachtig in Luceberts vroege oeuvre. Deze uitgave, verrijkt met tekeningen uit dezelfde periode, is een grote literaire gebeurtenis.
Georges Perec -'t Manco
Perec beschrijft in ’t Manco een wereld waarin de letter e – de meest voorkomende klinker in onze taal – verbannen is. In dit boeiende verhaal vol diepere betekenissen maakt Perec met de nodige humor dit gemis constant voelbaar. Een gemis waar hoofdpersoon Anton Vocalis en de andere personages in dit boek maar niet de vinger achter weten te krijgen.
Jorge Luis Borges - Het geheimschrift en andere gedichten
Keuze uit het dichterlijke werk van de Argentijnse schrijver (1899-1986) met vertaling en annotaties.
Fritzi Harmsen van Beek - In goed en kwaad: verzameld werk
Verzameld dichtwerk en proza van de Nederlandse schrijfster (1927-2000).
Julio Cortazar - Verzamelde verhalen
Cortázar is een van de grote vernieuwers van de Latijns-Amerikaanse literatuur. Zijn verhalen balanceren tussen spel en ernst, droom en werkelijkheid, vrijheid en beklemming. Met humor, precisie en een onnavolgbare verbeeldingskracht nodigt hij de lezer uit de wereld opnieuw te ervaren—altijd onzeker of we te maken hebben met logica of met toverkunst.
Johnny van Doorn - Verzamelde gedichten
'De stem die ik op de radio had gehoord, zat heel herkenbaar en precies 'passend' in die ritmisch voortratelende regels opgesloten. Zij begon, onder het lezen, onmiddellijk en vanzelfsprekend met de woorden mee te galmen en te sputteren.
De Verzamelde gedichten van Johnny van Doorn (1944-1991) bevat de dichtbundels Een nieuwe mongool (1966) en De heilige huichelaar (1968) en verspreid gepubliceerd werk.
Dichter
Dichter is meer dan een uitgave van verzamelde gedichten, het is een poëtische autobiografie. Voor deze nieuwe editie werd het boek aangevuld met de bundel Licht van mijn leven (2014).
Charlotte Mutsaers - Dooier op drift: gedichten
Dooier op drift sleurt de lezer mee van filosofie naar gruwelgedachte, van euforie naar desolaatheid, van hemel naar hel, van mineur naar majeur en vice versa, telkens weer volgens het eeuwenoude stramien van de Russische skatsjok waar Mutsaers sinds haar romandebuut De markiezin patent op heeft. Een bundel die getuigt van het eeuwig jonge hart van Charlotte Mutsaers.
Poetry
Only Mystery
Weaving together twenty-one full-color drawings and new translations of prose pieces and poems, Only Mystery presents a textured life of Spain's greatest modern poet and playwright. This volume of his visual art - largely unknown - and his writing chronicles Lorca's short existence, beginning with poems of his.Childhood and ending with his prophesies of assassination. The work illuminates his vision of nature, the gypsies of southern Spain, his experiences in New York, and, above all, his sense of the mystery of love and death.
Death of a Naturalist
Poems deal with fathers, the past, mortality, nature, violence, school, rural life, love, fear, and childhood.
Creative writing
Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer's Craft
Bringing together 25 essential works of creative writing criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the key debates in creative writing today, from the ethics of appropriation to the politics of literary evaluation. Critical Creative Writing covers such topics as: Craft & Politics Language & Community Identity & Authorship Representation & Counternarrative Appropriation & Intertextuality Evaluation & Genre The book anthologizes critical essays written by international literary writers. Each essay is contextualized with an introduction as well as sample questions, writing prompts and suggested readings.
The elements of style
The original edition of the concise classic, with essential advice for aspiring writers like "omit needless words." With simple principles and helpful tips on usage and composition, as well as lists of common errors to avoid, The Elements of Style was first published during World War I by Cornell University professor William Strunk Jr. Originally intended for Cornell students, it would become widely renowned as a memorable short guide for those who want to write clear, correct, and effective prose. A staple in countless classrooms and a touchstone for generations, it is still relevant and useful a century later.
Creative Writing and Stylistics. Revised and Expanded Edition Critical and Creative Approaches
In this innovative fusion of practice and criticism, Jeremy Scott shows how insights from stylistics and linguistics can enrich the craft of creative writing. Focusing on crucial methodological issues that confront the practicing writer, this book introduces writers to key topics from stylistics, provides in-depth analysis of a wide range of writing examples and includes practical exercises to help develop creative writing skills.
The Bloomsbury introduction to creative writing
Covering all of the major genres and now with a revised and expanded chapter on writing for digital media plus an extended selection of exercises and guidance on cross-genre writing, the second edition of The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing is a complete introductory manual for students of creative writing. Through a structured series of practical writing exercises - perfect for the classroom, the writer's workshop or as a starting point for a portfolio of work - the book builds the student writer from the first steps through to mastery of a wide range of genres and forms.
A Poetry Handbook
Offers advice on reading and writing poetry, and discusses imitation, sound, the line, poem forms, free verse, diction, imagery, revision, and workshops.
The Creative Writer's Survival Guide
The Creative Writer's Survival Guide is a must-read for creative-writing students and teachers, conference participants, and aspiring writers of every stamp. Directed primarily at fiction writers but suitable for writers of all genres, John McNally's guide is a comprehensive, take-no-prisoners blunt, highly idiosyncratic, and delightfully subjective take on the writing life.
A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination
Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration.
About Writing
Taking up specific questions (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), the author examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, this book treats each topic with clarity and insight.
Brevity
Over the past ten years or so, "Short-shorts" or "Flash Fiction" has emerged as an increasingly popular and visible genre within fiction. David Galef's Brevity offers a guide to the genre for creative writing students by combining discussions of the various approaches and methods within the genre, examples of the form, and prompts for students to develop their own writing. Galef includes examples of the short-short genre from such writers as Collette, Donald Barthelme, and Borges. He examines the ways in which these authors drew on the form and how compression and other techniques are able to produce works of power, humor, or insight.
Essays in the Art of Writing
Although several of Robert Louis Stevenson's major works -- Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- have been enshrined in the Western canon of popular literature, these novels represent only a fraction of a prodigious body of writing that spans virtually every genre. Stevenson was a prolific and preternaturally skilled writer, and in these essays, he offers insight, tips, and inspiration that will capture the imagination of both fans of his work and would-be writers.
Creative Writing
Diving into this beloved practice, Creative Writing explores how the written word can be used as a therapeutic tool in pursuit of improved mental health and wellbeing. Exploring a variety of settings, including group writing, writing alone, and even workshopping online, pracademic duo Mark Pearson and Helen Foster design and deliver a series of contemporary case studies related to mental health, menopause, mindfulness and psychosis.
The Handbook of Creative Writing
This is the inspirational resource for tutors, students and other creative writing professionals, now in a new edition. 54 chapters cover the three central pillars of writing creatively: theories of creativity, the craft of writing and creative writing as a business. With contributions from over 50 experts - poets, novelists, dramatists, publishers, editors, tutors, critics and scholars - from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia, this is the essential guide to writing, and getting published.
Discovering Creative Writing
This is a book about discovering how you do creative writing. How you begin, how you structure, how your writing process works, how a work embodies movement and change, what influences you, and, ultimately, how you end. Discovering Creative Writing points you toward clues that can assist you in understanding your own creative writing as well as the creative writing of others. This book is both a practical guide and a critical examination that empowers the reader to find things out and use that information to develop and support their own creative writing.
The creative writing compass
This distinctive guide to the practice of creative writing and to its critical understanding is based in the actions of creation and in each individual writer's responses to those actions. The 'compass' refers to the range of outcomes produced in creative writing - from finished works to the experiences creative writers have while writing, as well as to the range of forces, influences and meanings that any writer is likely to encounter along the way. The Creative Writing Compass is a guide to the consideration, progression and completion of creative writing projects, providing ways of thinking about work-in-progress as well as ways of determining and reflecting on end results.
Intersecting genre. A skills-based approach to creative writing
Covering fiction, poetry, nonfiction, writing plays and screenwriting, and also taking stock of the forms that do not fit neatly into any genre silo, this book uses models, critical questions, writing warm-ups and writing practice exercises to give you a solid understanding of the points discussed and encouraging you to put them to practice in your own work. With the field of creative writing evolving constantly, and with approaches to teaching and learning the subject vast and continually expanding, this book offers a dynamic, and uniquely holistic method for developing your writing skills, asking you to deeply consider the issues, and possibilities, present in genre.
The Clay Writer: Shaping in Creative Writing
This concise book by the well-known Serbian writer and literary researcher summarizes his decade-long experience of teaching creative writing at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Always offering attendees four good reasons for not attending his course, or, in a broader perspective, discouraging them from professional writing altogether, the author reflects ultimately on what it really takes to become a writer of literary fiction. This essay, which makes up the first part of this work, is complemented by a selection of witty short stories, forming the second part, and which have been used as templates in the teaching context.
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel
The first novel-writing guide from the best-selling Save the Cat! story-structure series, which reveals the 15 essential plot points needed to make any novel a success. Novelist Jessica Brody presents a comprehensive story-structure guide for novelists that applies the famed Save the Cat! screenwriting methodology to the world of novel writing. Revealing the 15 "beats" (plot points) that comprise a successful story--from the opening image to the finale--this book lays out the Ten Story Genres (Monster in the House; Whydunit; Dude with a Problem) alongside quirky, original insights to help novelists craft a plot that will captivate--and a novel that will sell.
Outside the box
Wonderstruck
A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain world Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life's most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.
Doing rebellious research: in and beyond the academy
The ways in which research and scholarship is co-produced, co-performed and proclaimed as particular kinds of knowledges and truths in and beyond the academy is radically changing. The capacity to write rebelliously, in varying registers and voices, tempos and volumes, as featured across this book, is boundaryless. At the heart of this book, we move between departing radically from academic writing to arriving at a new academic endeavor and transaction between reader and text driven by the invitation to open rebellion in academic research and writing.
Creativity & Inspiration
The Creative Act
Creativity has a place in everyone's life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities. The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime's work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments--and lifetimes--of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.
Bird by Bird
An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is "a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps" (Los Angeles Times). "Superb writing advice.... Hilarious, helpful, and provocative." --The New York Times Book Review For a quarter century, more than a million readers--scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities--have been inspired by Anne Lamott's hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice.
Faith, Hope and Carnage
A meditation on faith, art, music, grief and much more - from cultural icon and bestselling author Nick Cave
The Artist's Joy
The ultimate guide for creatives of all disciplines and levels to discover a sustainable, joyful artistic practice. Whether you are a dabbler, a career creative, or a long-time self-proclaimed "tortured artist," Dr. Merideth Hite Estevez is here to help. As a professional oboist, teacher, creative coach, graduate of The Juilliard School, and beloved host of the podcast Artists for Joy, Dr. Estevez knows the world of creatives and what they truly need to cultivate a life-giving practice. The Artist's Joyoffers not only tools for the journey but a deeper understanding of the ways the miracle of creativity works in our lives.
Wild about books
Essays about the shared experience of literature, the art and craft of writing, the pleasures of reading, the survival of five hundred years of print culture, together with reflections and suggestions on creative writing, on what to do, and how to do it, and on what I’ve done, and why I wrote this book and how I wrote that one, together with anecdotes from other writers’ experiences, from writers in person, and from the books they have written.
Creative confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all
In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.
Writing with Pleasure
An essential guide to cultivating joy in your professional and personal writing Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a painful chore. Acclaimed international writing expert Helen Sword invites you to step into your "WriteSPACE"--a space of pleasurable writing that is socially balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively challenging, and emotionally uplifting.
Sudden Genius?
Andrew Robinson explores the exceptional creativity in both scientists and artists by following the trail that led ten individuals from childhood to the achievement of a famous creative breakthrough as an adult, in archaeology, architecture, art, biology, chemistry, cinema, music, literature, photography, and physics.
The poetry and music of science: comparing creativity in science and art
The Poetry and Music of Science examines aspects of science and art that bear close comparison - for example the art of the novel and the art of scientific experimentation. The book eavesdrops on conversations between scientists on how new theories arise, and listens to artists' and composers' witness of their own creative processes.
Science and Art
Science in Modern Poetry
What does the poetry of a leading immunologist and a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist tell us about how poetry can engage with science? How can universities help to bring these different experimental cultures and practices together? What questions do literary critics need to ask themselves when looking at poems that respond to science? How did developments in biology between the wars shape modernist poetry? What did William Empson make of science fiction, Ezra Pound of the fourth dimension, Thomas Hardy of anthropology? How did modern poets from W. B. Yeats to Elizabeth Bishop and Judith Wright respond to the legacy of Charles Darwin? This book aims to answer these questions and more, in the process setting out the state of the field and suggesting new directions and approaches for research by students and scholars working on the fertile relationship between science and poetry today.
The Poetry of Victorian Scientists
A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity. Also considering Edward Lear, Daniel Brown finds the Victorian renaissances in research science and nonsense literature to be curiously interrelated. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists.
Myth, metaphor and science
This book explores the way in which language is used in fiction, poetry and science. It examines the role of metaphor in structuring our thought, and questions any simplistic notion of creativity. There is an enquiry into the significance of myth for the modern writer. Why do our earliest narratives return to haunt us at the end of history? The final essays ask what it means to attempt scientific descriptions of reality in words. Can language here ever be anything more than a clumsy approximation of mathematics. The book ends with a paper written jointly by the particle physicist Goronwy Tudor.
Geography, Art, Research
This book explores the intersection of geographical knowledge and artistic research in terms of both creative methods and practice-based research. In doing so it brings together geography's 'creative turn' with the art world's 'research turn.' Inspired by the geographies of science and knowledge, art history and theory, and accounts of working within and beyond disciplines, this book seeks to understand the geographies of research at the intersection of geography and creative arts practices, how these geographies challenge existing understandings of these disciplines and practices, and what they might contribute to our wider discussions of working beyond disciplines, including through artistic research.
The Language Imperative
Many of us view language as a tool, a means by which to communicate our thoughts and emotions. But is there more to language than just "talk"? Can learning languages actually change the way you think? Drawing on examples from the worlds of medicine, business, religion, and family life, Elgin illustrates that each language learned gains for the speaker another worldview -- perhaps even another personality. Based on solid science and filled with personal insights, The Language Imperative is required reading for anyone interested in how words shape our lives, both as individuals and as a nation.
William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton's Sleep
The history and philosophy of scientific ideas and the role poiēsis and imagination play in our understanding of science and progress are widely explored in this book. By examining the views of William Blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Jacob Bronowski, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Karl Popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science that may help to resolve some of our most pressing ecological problems as seen in the context of science and technology studies and what is loosely developing into the discipline of environmental humanities.
Dark Precursor : Deleuze and Artistic Research
Gilles Deleuze's intriguing concept of the dark precursor refers to intensive processes of energetic flows passing between fields of different potentials. Fleetingly used in Difference and Repetition, it remained underexplored in Deleuze's subsequent work. In this collection of essays numerous contributors offer perspectives on Deleuze's concept of the dark precursor as it affects artistic research, providing a wide-ranging panorama on the intersection between music, art, philosophy, and scholarship.
W. G. Sebald's Artistic Legacies
Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.